Last year we had the ‘Year of Biodiversity’, next year we’ve got ‘The Year of Sustainable Energy for all’, but in their ever increasing effort to promote environmental issues, the United Nations has officially declared 2011 ‘The International Year of Forests’.
As with most United Nation’s ‘years of’, the year of the forests is designed to “raise awareness at all levels to strengthen the sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests for the benefit of current and future generations”. In that rather wordy sentence there is a rather good idea. Instead of concentrating on raising awareness of the dangers of deforestation we should raise awareness of what can be done to combat it.
People know that deforestation is a major problem, contributing 20% of the world’s greenhouse gasses through the C02 released when trees are cut down. People know that deforestation leads to flash floods and landslides and people know that deforestation leads to a devastating loss of biodiversity. In short, people know that deforestation is a huge problem, one that causes massive amounts of both environmental and human suffering.
Knowing all the facts however doesn’t mean that we have an easy solution. With an ever increasing third world population needing more land to farm and cultivate crops, and with huge multinational companies destroying hector after hector in order to satisfy public demand for commercial products such as palm oil, it’s a viciously difficult problem to overcome.
Despite the enormity of the problem however, people have had plenty of ideas. One of the most interesting is the United Nation’s ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’ scheme, otherwise known as REDD. REDD is essentially a way of paying poor countries to protect their forests. For rainforest nations such as Indonesia and Brazil, their forests are currently worth more to them dead than alive due to the levels of income generated by the lucrative logging trade as well as income gained from the acquisition of more land. The idea therefore is to make trees and forests more economically valuable when they are alive and intact rather than when they are hacked down and destroyed.
Inevitably however, an idea as brilliantly simple as REDD is not so simple in reality. It’s a simple idea but putting it into action is going to be extremely complicated and fraught with potential pitfalls and problems.
Despite the complications however it is promising to know that progress is being made on a viable scheme to cut the levels of deforestation in the world. A scheme that doesn’t work by judging those countries that do it but a scheme that works with them to tackle the causes of the problem.
Tackling deforestation with schemes like REDD is not going to be an easy or quick task, but with perseverance and support it is entirely possible. The United Nations has declared 2011 a call to arms: a year where real progress could be made on tackling one of the world’s most extreme environmental issues and to show us just what a difference a year can make.
